


A Wind in These Sails

by Siria



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 20:19:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2665037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's started to dream again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Wind in These Sails

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sheafrotherdon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/gifts).



> Thanks to Trin and Jenn for all their help! A terribly belated birthday present for Cate.

It had stopped raining by the time Steve finally let himself in the front door, but his clothes were still waterlogged, his pants hanging heavy from his hips. His boots were soaked and he took them off and left them on the mat in the vague hope that they'd dry out by morning. Steve peeled off his socks, lip curling in distaste at the way they squelched in his hand, and then padded through the quiet apartment to the bedroom. It wasn't much past six in the evening but there was already a Sam-shaped lump under the sheets. Steve had been looking forward to taking the hottest shower he could stand, but he'd long been a fan of taking an opportunity where he saw one. He shucked out of the rest of his clothes, dumped them into the laundry basket, and then crawled into bed as well.

Sam cracked open one eye for a moment, yawned, and then closed it again. "There a reason why I get woken up from my nice nap by Captain America's freezing feet?"

"It was raining out," Steve said, leaning in for a moment to press a kiss to the corner of Sam's mouth.

"Well, I figured," Sam said. He mostly sounded drowsy, but there was a hint of familiar amusement in his voice. "Either that or you decided to swim home across the East River. You don't smell bad enough for that." He made an elaborate show of sniffing at Steve, eyes still closed, nose scrunched up, that had Steve laughing and the two of them shifting so that Steve's head, damp as it was, was snugged up against Sam's warm shoulder.

"You're a real laugh riot," Steve said, feeling the muscles in his neck and shoulders slowly start to relax as Sam's warmth seeped into him. "The meeting got out early and I thought I'd walk home, but then the skies opened." Steve didn't think he'd had to walk anywhere with boots that wet since the last time he'd had to do a forced march through the Ardennes.

"Okay," Sam said, tugging the covers up more firmly over them. "So here's the plan. We have a little nap here, you take a shower, then we head around the corner and get us some jerk chicken for dinner. No way you can stay cold after that."

"Sounds good," Steve said, hooking one of his feet around Sam's ankle. "Maybe—"

He was cut off by the sound of the rain starting up with renewed fierceness, the drops drumming so loudly against the windows that Steve could barely hear himself think.

"Of course," Sam said without missing a beat, wrapping his arm around Steve's waist, "we can always order in."

Steve laughed and said—

He woke up. For a moment, Steve was disoriented. It was early morning, judging by the slant of the light, and the sliver of sky he could see over the top of the buildings across the street was bright blue. There was no one else there; the sheets beside him were cold. Then the last of the sleep-fog cleared. It had been a dream. Steve was in his own apartment, the one he'd bought when he'd decided to move back to Brooklyn; Sam lived in D.C. where, as far as Steve was aware, he was perfectly happy spending his time doing stuff other than cuddling with Steve. And that was—

Steve pushed himself out of bed and reached for his sneakers. It seemed like a brisk thirty-mile run was in order.

*****

The run didn't do much to help distract him; normally it helped to clear his head but now Steve couldn't seem to stop remembering being back on the Mall, using Sam's rhythm to help pace himself.

Steve was more than usually grateful for modern plumbing when he got back to his apartment, because he spent so long jerking off in the shower, one hand splayed against the white tile and the sound of his own breathing loud in his ears, that he was surprised the water didn't run cold. It wasn't that he meant to draw it out. He thought about the span of Sam's shoulders, the smell of his fresh sweat and the strength of his body when he'd snatched Steve out of mid-air, how warm Sam's hand would be when wrapped around Steve's cock, how firm his grip, and was so close to coming that he was shaking with it. It was just, he told himself, that this would have to be a one-time thing, that he couldn't let himself make a habit of taking advantage of a friend like this, even if it was only in the privacy of his own head.

He did feel better afterwards, though, more relaxed and his head a little clearer. Of course, just as Steve was sitting down at his kitchen table with a mug of coffee and a stack of peanut-butter-slathered toast, his phone chimed with a new message. He stood back up and retrieved it from the kitchen counter, thumbing the message open.

**Sam (08:17)**  
 _Hey man, how you doing? Forgot to send these to you yesterday. Veterans' Picnic we helped organise. They had cupcakes with your face on them_.

Attached were three photos—one looking down along a trestle table overflowing with food and surrounded by people, slightly blurry as if someone had jostled Sam's arm while he was taking it; one of a bunch of kids, each one holding out a brightly-coloured cupcake and mugging it up for the camera; one of Sam with a group of people Steve didn't recognise. A group, Steve realised with alarm when he zoomed in on the picture, which included what looked like a full-bird colonel and at least two ministers.

_A one-time thing_ , Steve told himself firmly; there was no reason to feel as if he was being preemptively judged by the clergy for something he hadn't even done yet when the photo was taken. After deliberating for a while, he wrote back:

**Steve (08:24)**  
 _Looks like a fun day. Sorry I missed it; hope my face cupcakes weren't terrible_.

As soon as he hit send, Steve regretted it. "'Hope my face cupcakes weren't terrible'?" he repeated, pulling a face. "Good job sounding natural, Rogers. Well done."

**Sam (08:26)**  
 _No they were great. Gives me a whole new set of puns about your face being delicious._

Steve stared at the screen in panic for a moment—was that flirting? It sounded like flirting. He was terrible at flirting back; what if it wasn't even flirting at all? Then he made a command decision to put his phone in the cupboard over the sink, where he could do no more damage with it, and returned to his now-cold toast.

*****

Steve had grown used to not dreaming very often. He didn't know if it was a side-effect of the serum—if the fact that he normally needed only a couple of hours' sleep a night meant that his brain never had the time it needed to conjure them up—or if it was because he'd run through his lifetime's quota during seventy years spent under the ice. Either way, his sleep was deep and dark, like his mind just skipped over the moments between him closing his eyes and him opening them again.

Or that was the way it had been. His ability to dream had come back all at once in the aftermath of seeing Bucky again, accelerated once Steve moved back to Brooklyn. Now it seemed like he dreamed every night, and when he did it was in saturated Technicolor. It was '38 and he was a foot shorter, breathing in the scent of boiling cabbage and carbolic soap as he trudged up the rickety stairs to his apartment; he was in the Alps for the first time, tilting his head back to look up and up and up at mountains that dwarfed even the tallest skyscraper; he was sitting under a tarp next to Peggy, trying in vain to capture the sharp curve of her smile with paper and pencil.

Steve dreamed about being in planes, about falling from them, jumping, being pushed. He dreamed about Bucky, smiling and holding out a metal hand to him; about Peggy, young again and holding his shield out in front of her. He dreamed about running along the Mall in Washington, seeing the shadow of a great bird skim over the ground in front of him and knowing that it must be Sam, hovering overhead.

It was Sam he dreamt of most of all, and it seemed like that should have been better. There was no war in Steve's dreams of Sam, no loss: only the thrumming sound of wing beats and low laughter; the phantom sensations of curling close to Sam on their couch, of letting Sam push him down against the mattress while Steve spread his legs. But in their aftermath, Steve woke up frustrated and hard and aching, ever more aware that he was alone.

One morning he was ticked off enough that he called Natasha before he could think better of it.

"Rogers," she said, tone of voice so dry that Steve just knew she was laughing at him, "are you seriously waking me up just to tell me that you've been having wet dreams? Because I'm pretty sure those weren't invented in the Sixties."

"I'm not—" Steve felt his cheeks redden. If only Sister Mary Aquinas or Mother Immaculata were around to hear this conversation; he'd been dragged by his ear to the confessional for a lot less. "I didn't say what I—I would never—"

"You said you've been having lots of dreams about Sam," Natasha said, "and there's only one kind of dream you could be having about Sam that would have you calling me at six in the morning panicking about what it means."

"I'm not _panicking_ ," Steve said, staring down at the saucepan of oatmeal he was stirring. It looked about as cheerful as he felt. "I just, I mean... Anyway, sometimes it's… sometimes we're just, you know… _cuddling_." For some obscure reason, saying that felt even more awkward than tacitly admitting to Natasha Romanoff that most nights recently he'd dreamt about the scrape of Sam's beard against the inside of his thighs.

"You could tell him that, you know," Natasha said. "With all this modern technology that's been invented, you could call him up and say 'hey, Sam'—"

"I'm not just going to call him up and say I want to have sex with him!" Steve hissed at her. Between reality TV and exposure to Tony Stark, he knew that things worked differently nowadays, but he still didn't think brazen propositioning was normal even in the twenty-first century. "I don't even know that he's the kind of guy who likes other guys."

"—'would you like to get coffee sometime?'" Natasha continued blithely. "'Maybe work our way up to cuddling?' Because you wouldn't want to be too forward or anything."

Steve sighed and spooned his oatmeal out into a bowl. "You're never going to let me forget this, are you?"

"Not even one little bit," Natasha said, her tone rich with satisfaction. Steve was really glad he hadn't even hinted at jerking off to thoughts of Sam. "But you should tell him, Steve. What's the worst that could happen?"

*****

"Oh, come on," Sam said. Behind him on the tablet screen, Steve could see shelves crowded with books and files—not Sam's office then, but some quiet part of the building where he could sit and eat his lunch without worrying he'd be dragged off to deal with the latest paperwork crisis. "You mean to tell me that all those USO tours you did, you never once met anyone famous?"

"Nope," Steve said. It had been a week since he'd talked with Natasha, and he still hadn't said anything to Sam. He told himself that he was just waiting for the right opportunity to say something, and that the right time wasn't when he was also making lunch; he told himself that it wasn't that he was scared, even though sometimes he thought he caught Sam looking at him in a way that made him hope.

Steve's new kitchen wasn't particularly big, and his StarkPad was propped up against the breadbox while he worked on slicing vegetables on the sliver of countertop between the oven and the sink. "It was just me and the girls, mostly. I did have my picture taken with lots of politicians, but they were mostly local guys. I don't think you'd've heard of any of them."

"See, that's just disappointing," Sam said, taking a bite of his sandwich. "You know why?"

"I'm pretty sure you're going to tell me," Steve said, dumping the onions into the pot and starting on the mushrooms.

"Of course I am," Sam said, "because some fool showed my mom how to use a computer, so now she's sending me all these links to _interesting_ facts she's read about you online. Facts like these get a guy to thinking."

Steve felt himself flush, and only the fact that he was holding a knife stopped him from burying his face in his hands. He knew there were websites about him; whole books, even, biographies of him and the Howling Commandos. Almost all of them were wrong about him in the weirdest ways, like seeing someone point to his reflection in a funhouse mirror and say it was true to life.

Natasha had killed time before a mission once by reading aloud excerpts of one of the academic books from her phone. " _The Star-Spangled Man and the Marshall Plan: Cinema, Cultural Imperialism and Captain America's Legacy in Post-War Europe_ ," she'd said with every evidence of utter relish. "Can't think why this didn't make the _New York Times'_ Best-Seller List. It's got a whole chapter about the international symbolism of your thighs, Rogers."

"'That _nice_ Steven'," Sam said, putting on a falsetto voice that sounded nothing like Loretta Wilson's warm tones, "'did you know he had a passionate fling with Jean Harlow?'"

Steve blinked. "Jean Harlow died in '37."

"Oh, but you had, I'm quoting here, a 'turbulent youth'," Sam said, slanting a look full of mischief at him. "Everybody knows that; you were getting up to all sorts of stuff, with those baby blues and that street punk attitude. It's on the internet so it must be true. Who knows what could've happened during Captain America's Lost Years?" He pressed a hand to his chest and said, mock-serious, "You're making me jealous here."

Steve rolled his eyes. "Getting beat up in Brooklyn alleyways isn't exactly the same as making time with movie stars, Sam."

"So you mean I shouldn't trust this clearly Photoshopped picture of you hanging out with Cary Grant? Or this story on Tumblr about how you got some kind of doppelganger who shows up as an extra in a couple scenes in _Casablanca_?"

"Probably not," Steve said wryly, looking down as he started to peel some cloves of garlic. "Even the movies they had me do before they sent me to Europe were pretty small time stuff, except for, uh, for some of them."

Sam's eyebrows rose up towards his hairline. "Yeah, with deflecting skills like that, it's a real mystery why they didn't send you into the diplomatic service."

"Nothing bad!" Steve said hurriedly. "Just, there was this big shot Hollywood director who got a deferment for helping out with stuff for the war effort. He directed some educational shorts that they showed to troops serving overseas."

"Educational?"

Steve sighed, set down the garlic on the cutting board and put his hands on his hips. "If you want to fight with Cap," he said in his best carrying, matinee-idol tones, "don't get the clap. You can't help defeat the Axis if you're battling VD, too. Be wary of juke joint snipers and know the risks of syphilis and gonorrhoea."

Steve didn't think he'd ever seen Sam laugh that hard, or for that long.

"Oh man," Sam said finally, wiping his eyes. "That is straight up the best thing I've ever heard. 'Juke joint snipers', really?"

"I didn't know what that meant until Bucky and Gabe told me afterwards," Steve confessed.

"Full of surprises," Sam murmured, and Steve didn't know how Sam could say a sentence that innocuous and still make Steve's skin prickle all over with a sudden wash of heat.

*****

That night Steve dozed off while reading. It was that kind of hazy half-sleep where you knew you were dreaming, but didn't really care. The space around him was a strange mixture of his apartment and Sam's, the view out the window of Brooklyn and the kitchen around them in DC. In his dream, Sam was emptying the dishwasher and Steve sitting at the tiny kitchen table, dutifully filling in bubble after bubble on a practice SAT exam.

"You know," Sam was saying, with the air of someone who had had this argument many times before, "I don't think anyone's going to turn you down on the basis of your SAT scores. There's not a school in the country that's going to reject Captain America, and you're still pulling all-nighters."

"Well, Steve Rogers is the one who wants to go to school," Steve said firmly, "not Captain America." He knew that for art school, the portfolio sitting in his living room was probably much more important than whatever score he might get on this test, but Steve didn't want any accusations of special treatment. And it had been a really, really long time since Steve had had to think about algebra.

He took a sip from his mug of tea and then turned back to the next question.

>   
> _To believe that social reforms can _____ evil altogether is to forget that evil is a protean creature, forever assuming a new _____ when deprived of an old one._
> 
> _(A) rejuvenate … allegiance_
> 
> _(B) eradicate … shape_
> 
> _(C) mitigate … providence_
> 
> _(D) sustain … episode_
> 
> _(E) dissolve … abstraction_

Steve swallowed heavily, felt something turn over in the pit of his stomach. He was asleep. He knew that. Nothing was certain or fixed in a dream.

Sam said, "Yeah, but I'm pretty sure other people are going to have ideas that don't take into account what you want?" He turned around and leaned against the countertop, folding his arms. He looked very serious. "What _do_ you want, Steve?"

*****

Steve came back from his run the next morning to find Natasha sitting on his sofa. Her pants lay discarded on the floor beside her, stained dark with what smelled like coffee, and she was sewing up a wicked-looking gash in her right calf with practiced ease.

"Hey Steve," she said without looking up. "There was a Hydra cell operating out of the back room of a Starbucks over in Park Slope. Hope you don't mind me dropping in to freshen up."

"So I guess you wouldn't appreciate it if I offered you a coffee right now?" Steve asked, trying his best to convey that he was neither paying attention to Natasha's thighs nor bothered by the fact that he knew what colour her underwear was.

One corner of Natasha's mouth quirked upwards. "I'm not the one you should be offering coffee."

"You're pretty insufferable sometimes, you know that?" Steve said as he headed over to the sink to get a glass of water.

"Doesn't make me wrong," Natasha said, finishing up the stitches and stowing the unused medical supplies back in Steve's first aid kit. "And all this stoic pining—"

"I'm not _pining_ ," Steve said, frowning over at her. "It's just, my life is pretty complicated and Sam doesn't deser—"

Natasha rolled her eyes before reaching over to the small kit bag that sat on the coffee table and pulling out a clean pair of sweatpants. "Excuses, excuses."

"Why do you care so much if I'm dating someone?" Steve said, leaning against the kitchen counter and folding his arms. He felt irritated, and more than that was aware that his irritation was a thin layer over something much bigger, a kind of bone-deep exhaustion.

Natasha looked over at him. The expression on her face was carefully blank. "Because I realised I could."

Steve let out a breath.

*****

He didn't sleep that night. Steve shrugged on a jacket and went for a walk around the neighbourhood, turning things over in his mind as he went block after block. He knew he'd been in a holding pattern for months: waiting to hear about leads on Bucky, or following the occasional reports of a sighting that never panned out to much; returning to Brooklyn because it felt safer to him than D.C. ever could, but where there were ghosts around every corner.

Somewhere around three, Steve found himself in an almost-deserted all-night diner, working his way through a stack of pancakes and bacon, and listening to the hum of music coming from a radio turned down low. The sole server on duty was a woman with a tired face and work-worn hands and a trace of an accent to her voice that made Steve think of his mom.

"You have a good rest of your night, hon," she said when he finally picked up his jacket, shortly before dawn, and dropped a twenty on the counter. She didn't look up from the row of salt shakers she was refilling. She didn't sound insincere; she didn't sound as if she'd recognised him at all. Steve left the diner and walked out onto a street that he'd known for a century, and where he knew no one and there was no one he seemed to want to get to know. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and thought of how Washington had been no more familiar than any of this, but at least there he'd had people he was learning to fight alongside.

At least there he'd had Sam—and shit, he thought, why did he keep trying to avoid the fact that he wanted Sam, when avoiding what he felt might actually be the scarier option?

"Come on," he told himself, "you punched out Hitler a hundred times, you can do this," and then hurriedly said, "Sorry, ma'am" to the woman who hurried past him with a fully-laden tote bag in each hand and a scandalised expression on her face.

Steve walked home quickly, thinking that if he packed light and didn't dawdle he could be in D.C. by noon. Steve was pretty sure that it was Sam's day to do the morning shift so he should be back at his apartment by the time Steve got there, and Steve was so caught up in worrying about the logistics of it all that he almost tripped over someone sitting on his building's stoop.

"Sam?" Steve asked, backing away a little to let him stand up.

"Hey, man," Sam said, brushing some dirt off his pants. "Sorry for dropping in on you out of the blue like this, but—"

"No," Steve blurted out, cutting him off, "it's fine, I was just…" He shut his mouth with a decided snap. There was no way he could finish that sentence with _I was actually just about to show up on your doorstep because I realised I wanted to kiss you so bad I couldn't wait any longer_ without sounding certifiable. "Is something wrong?"

Sam shook his head. He looked, Steve realised, more than a little bit nervous; he didn't know that he'd ever seen that expression on Sam's face before. "So this is going to sound weird," Sam said, "but I'd appreciate if you'd just hear me out."

"Okay," Steve said slowly. "Shoot."

"I've been thinking over what we were talking about before, about the two of us heading over to Europe if one of Natasha's leads pans out."

"Oh." Steve had always known that was a big ask—Sam still had a job in D.C., a life and a family, and it was only thanks to what Steve suspected was a strategic intervention on the part of Stark Industries that no charges had been pressed about Sam's involvement in the theft of the XO-7 prototype. Sam had given up a lot for Steve's sake, and Steve couldn't ask him to do more. "Well, that's… I mean, I understand and—"

"What did I just say about hearing me out?" Sam said, looking torn between amusement and irritation. "I'm in this with you, but I'm not going to do anything under false pretences. Look, I'm not saying that I won't help you out if you turn me down here, but if I do go with you, I want to lay all my cards on the table first."

"Your cards," Steve repeated, still not quite sure where this was going.

" I drove up here because I couldn't sleep with trying to figure out whether or not you actually _meant_ it all those times I thought you were flirting back."

"Flirting back?" Steve said slowly. He felt like he did if he'd been up three or four days in a row and even the serum couldn't quite keep him functioning at full capacity, like language didn't fully make sense anymore. "You like me?"

"I _like_ -like you, even," Sam said, the ghost of a smile flitting across his face. He stuck his hands in his pockets. "I just—I thought you should know because if it's going to make it awkward or weird for you, maybe we should cut our losses right now and—"

"I'm pretty sure I'd like to kiss you right now," Steve said hoarsely, in a voice he almost couldn't recognise as his own.

Sam blinked at him. "You're _pretty_ sure?"

Instead of answering, Steve took two steps forward and cupped Sam's face in his hands. Sam's mouth was soft and warm against his, and the way his beard caught and rasped against Steve's stubble made Steve shiver. Steve nipped at Sam's lower lip, and then opened his mouth to let Sam's tongue in, moaning a little at how good it felt. He felt clumsy but not uncertain, not yet knowing what Sam would like but trusting that he'd have the chance to find out. They kissed and kissed, and Steve wrapped one hand around the nape of Sam's neck, stroking at the smooth skin there with his thumb.

"Okay, so you're pretty sure," Sam said, when they finally broke apart to breathe. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his arms wrapped tightly around Steve's waist.

"Yeah," Steve said. He was pressed so close to Sam that he could feel the way Sam's breathing hitched when Steve ran his hand down Sam's back. "Pretty sure," he said, and smiled, because none of this felt like a dream at all.


End file.
